Issues regarding scholarly and other texts being addressed by Resource Library and TFAO

.Issues regarding scholarly and other texts being addressed by Resource Library and TFAO

- Lessened emphasis on an art history major, and the texts associated with the major, on the part of many college students due to the high cost of a college education coupled with a dearth of related job prospects following graduation.

- Lessened emphasis on an art in public high schools.

- Scarcity of online free access to many American representational art history essays, articles, and other texts for the benefit of students, teachers, scholars and others. Organizations such as Google and Amazon have digitized enormous volumes of books, yet keyword searches of essays within many important exhibition catalogues and brochures remain unavailable because the texts are not yet digitized. Or, in many instances, only snippets of digitized text are available via searches.

- Monetizing of access to magazine articles previously free online. In recent years many texts that were once provided to the public without charge are now only available via paid subscription to reader services such as JSTOR. See examples in TFAO's catalogue Articles and Essays Online.

- Severe cuts in funding at many museums, impacting their ability to organize or mount special exhibits and make available catalogues and brochures associated with them. For numerous museums, budget constraints are necessitating renting relatively inexpensive traveling exhibits.

- Cuts in funding to free public libraries, lessening their ability to purchase art books.

- Lack of online extensive cross-indexing of multimedia information related to scholarly texts.

- Value of searches provided by companies such as Google being diminished by a flood of low value content burying high value content.

- Lack of geographical accessibility to large amounts of American art history texts.

- Lack of texts facilitating reading by persons with visual handicaps or those not proficient in the English language.

- Time constraints imposed on students, coupled with the time-consuming and tedious nature of physically accessing research material through physical library visitation or interlibrary loans, using handwriting for note gathering, followed by hand typing of papers, reducing as a result the time available for research and analysis.

Resource Library is an online publication of Traditional Fine Arts Organization (TFAO), a non-profit organization. Provided to the public without charge, Resource Library is the most informative and educational online publication devoted to American representational art. The TFAO Free Online Digital Library permanently archives Resource Library's published articles and essays.

"Scholarly" texts are authored by identified individuals. Examples include new essays or previously published essays from brochures, catalogues and gallery guides; member magazine articles; other articles and blogs; scripts of plays; transcripts of abridged and whole speeches and lectures.

Academic journals employ single or double blind peer review processes prior to publication. TFAO, on the other hand, as an online publisher enables post-publication criticism permanently available online to all viewers of its content. We offer a free and fair mechanism for criticism of facts in all published texts. We invite all of our readers to challenge the veracity of authors' texts published in Resource Library.

"Other" texts include checklists, wall panel and label texts, audio tour scripts and other texts for exhibitions.

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Links to sources of information outside of our web site are provided only as referrals for your further consideration. Please use due diligence in judging the quality of information contained in these and all other web sites. Information from linked sources may be inaccurate or out of date. TFAO neither recommends or endorses these referenced organizations. Although TFAO includes links to other web sites, it takes no responsibility for the content or information contained on those other sites, nor exerts any editorial or other control over them. For more information on evaluating web pages see TFAO's General Resources section in Online Resources for Collectors and Students of Art History.

Search Resource Library for thousands of articles and essays on American art.